# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S369
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Discords in the Lutheran Church of Prussia. 369

theological scholarship must again seek and find, out of the deep and total
apostasy from all Christianity, out of the wrong paths of rationalism and
pietism, the way back to the pure and unadulterated doctrine of the Lutheran
confession — what wonder is it that we still meet with much confusion, much
disorder, much hard struggle there, in which the Church must first come to
clarity with all the unclean spirits that have roamed freely on her ground in
times past? And if, in this struggle, human weakness and passion also mix in
at many points — as, alas, seldom fails to happen in this sinful life — that is
indeed most blameworthy and lamentable, but it does not rob us of the
confidence that the trials and struggles of the Church, no less today than in
earlier centuries, will bring forth a sweet fruit of righteousness and truth.

It is well known that in the eighteen-thirties of this century, through
separation from the Union, the Lutheran Church in Prussia rose anew. After
long and heavy persecution, when times of outward calm set in, pastors and
congregational deputies gathered in 1841 in Breslau for a general synod, at
which a new church order and constitution was deliberated and fixed for the
Lutheran congregations separated from the Union and from the state church
government. Let no one fail to recognize the difficulty of this work,
especially for that time. For the Lutheran Church had until then been a
territorial church, and it was now a matter of erecting an entirely new
constitutional structure, one that had never existed before, for free
Lutheran congregations — and this at a time when scarcely the first steps of
the return from rationalism and pietism had been taken, at a time when by far
the greatest part of the Lutheran Church still lay as in the sleep of death,
when at no German university had the Lutheran confession yet come again to
recognition and honor, when countless questions of doctrine still lay
undiscussed that have since become the subject of theological research and
have been brought to clear consciousness for us. We must truly marvel, when
we look at the venerable witnesses of the Lutheran Church in Prussia in those
times, how they stood not only unshaken in bonds and afflictions, almost
alone in the field of our German-Lutheran Church, with their confession, but
how, insofar as it came to pass, they also truly succeeded, by God's grace,
in gathering the Church out of scattered fragments — all that the Union had
left them — in ordering it, and in giving it a new constitutional structure
in which it has dwelt in blessing to this day and has spread over all parts
of Prussia.

Yet the view of this blessing must not blind us to the defects that cling to
this constitutional structure. It is indeed precisely the triumph of divine
grace and wisdom to fill even fragile and partly unclean vessels with rich
blessing. Two different causes in particular worked unfavorably upon the new
constitutional structure: first, the circumstances of the time. Until then
people had been accustomed to the state-